I've Loved You So Long

Rematerialising after a 15-year absence, Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) is reunited with her younger sister Léa (Elsa Zylberstein), while meeting for the first time Léa's husband of ten years Luc (Serge Hazanavicius) and the family that she has formed with him. Léa's elderly father-in-law Paul (Jean-Claude Arnaud) may have been rendered mute by a stroke, and her youngest daughter Émilie (Lys Rose) may be still an infant, but no-one, it seems, wants to talk about why Juliette has been away - apart from Émilie's eight-year-old sister Clélis (Lise Ségur), whose innocent curiosity is repaid with parental scolding. Clearly Juliette has been in prison rather than living, as Léa and Luc maintain, in the Southern provinces – but the whole truth of what crime she committed, and more importantly why, will emerge only with time.

How much time? Well, more or less the duration of French novelist Philippe Claudel's directorial debut I've Loved You So Long. For this is not a film of narrative events so much as of unfolding exposition, as the details of Juliette's secret are gradually revealed, and her incarceration, both literal and metaphorical, is laid bare in all its tragedy. Essentially this is a drama about the solitude of suffering, the curse of blood and the possibility of rebirth, but it masquerades as a thriller. Questions are raised, answers are carefully deferred, and so ambiguity and suspense are generated as Claudel plays our sympathies off against our prejudices. All those awkward silences, exchanged glances, imperfect recollections and nuanced equivocations make us wonder whether Léa is right to welcome her cold sister into the fragile warmth of the household, whether the clearly damaged Juliette is headed for rehabilitation or recidivism, or indeed whether there are other, more complicated scenarios of guilt, blame, denial and betrayal lurking beneath the surface.

In a sense, this masquerade both keeps the film interesting and becomes its ultimate undoing. Claudel's series of nods, winks and deep-red herrings (a knife raised here, an over-defensive reaction there) raise all manner of suspicions in the viewer that ultimately come to nothing, and yet that are more compelling, more believable even, than the actual solution eventually offered to the film's mysteries. The ending certainly puts us, not to mention the two sisters, through the emotional wringer, but it is difficult not to escape the feeling that you have been manipulated into this position, that all that withholding of information has been serving the plot rather than plausibility. How, after a full investigative trial, is it really possible that no-one knows Juliette's secret, no matter how silent she may herself have remained on the issue?

So note-perfect are the performances from all the cast in I've Loved You So Long that you want them to inhabit a film that is somehow less contrived and more honest. Instead they end up being serious dramatic characters unable, despite their best efforts, to escape the confines of a labored melodrama.